Welcome to taPrime Consulting

taPrime Consulting Ltd provides consultancy services, solving freeze drying problems, helping you develop robust formulations and processes, and providing expert advice to the pharmaceutical and life sciences industries. Ensuring that you do indeed get Quality by Design. We believe that freeze drying is a science and not an art, even though it may not follow text book chemistry. Text book chemistry primarily describes systems that are in thermodynamic equilibrium, but in general a frozen solution is not, it is under kinetic control. This is the key to understanding freeze drying and leads us towards rational process and product design, and away from trial and error experimentation. Follow the link for more details of our services.

Reduce your primary drying time by using a cardboard box and a bottle of Coca-cola.
Controlled nucleation reduces primary drying time by aligning ice crystals. Other industries go further and use both temperature gradients and additives to direct the ice crystal architecture of a frozen solution. In the pharmaceutical industry, however, using formulation to control ice crystal architecture is essentially unexplored. Can it be done? Well there is one outstanding example of a homogenous open network structure templated by freezing ice from diluted cola using bottom up nucleation. Something you could recreate with a cardboard box and a bottle of Coca-cola! Want to know more, then go to our Gazette page. Research into formulation directed ice crystal growth is long overdue.

Mannitol and Vial Cracking
Although our taPrimer archive already has an article on the Use of Mannitol, feedback to the site suggests that a little more explanation is needed as to why vial cracking is common when using mannitol - though strictly speaking vial cracking only occurs when mannitol is misused. Click the link to read our taPrimer on Vial Cracking.

Looking for information about freeze drying?
It isn't always easy to find the information you want, but this web site can help in two ways. On our Useful Information page we have collected some information on basic physical properties, Tg' values, SVP of water over ice at various temperatures, and a conversion table for various pressure units. From time to time we also publish some tutorial articles on different aspects of freeze-drying; these are our taPrimers. Newly published articles are featured on our home page, but we also maintain an archive of all our tutorials in our taPrimer archive.

We now offer a 2 day in house training course. Click here for more details.